‘Why the
He smiled. But the smile was entirely for himself. ‘My own childhood, Martin, was very different from that which I was able to provide for you.’
This was not promising. I sipped my coffee. I would take solace in the coffee, which was excellent. ‘I know that, Dad.’
‘Please. Don’t interrupt.’ He stood and walked over to one of the tall windows. ‘My mother, your grandmother, did her best. But they were tough times, unforgiving decades in which to be a working-class widow with an infant child to provide for.’ He paused, over by the stately windows of his extravagant home. And he allowed his impoverished and sometimes humiliating childhood to return and haunt him afresh. ‘Christmases were particularly grim. I was a bright boy and that tormented my mother. I believe she suffered agonies of guilt over all the things her poverty denied me. They were austere times, of course. But my schoolmates were a privileged lot. The comparisons were inevitable, and the privation stark and obvious and sometimes, I’ll admit it, shaming.’ He cleared his throat.
‘There were junk shops, second-hand shops, pawn shops all over the neighbourhood of Manchester in which we lived then. For people like ourselves these places functioned, in a way, as banks. The shoes you sold them were security against the money they gave you for the shoes until you could afford to buy the shoes back. And the difference between what you received and what you paid was the interest. And the interest was marginal, a compassionate matter, usually, of just a few pennies added to the principal sum.’
He paused again, head bowed, remembering. My father still grieved for his mother almost with the raw pain with which he grieved for mine. And she was in his heart and memory now, I could tell.
‘Of course, these shops did sell things. Zinc bathtubs would hang from pegs. There would be racks of second-hand bicycles. And in those days, perhaps surprisingly, most coveted among their stock were books. It would have been 1963. I would have been eleven years old. The wireless meant the BBC and a universe alien to the one I inhabited. Television was vastly beyond my mother’s means. But I loved books. I was a religious attendee at the local lending library. I thirsted for knowledge and sensation. And lending libraries were free.’
He turned to me. He was a silhouette at the window. My father, the self-made millionaire, a nimbus of light around his greying head, stood remembering.
‘There was an educator in the 1930s. A man named Arthur Mee?’
I shook my head. The name meant nothing.
‘Mee compiled a children’s encyclopedia. By the time I encountered it, it was already thirty years out of date. But its volumes were packed nevertheless for the child I was with exotic and spellbinding vistas of a world for which I was not just eager, but greedy. There was a picture of a giant redwood in one volume, a tunnel bored through its immense trunk big enough to accommodate a car. In another volume, some brave soul had pictured a brown bear, twelve feet high as it reared up in the posture of a man. There were giant marlin and power station turbines and tidal waves and the electronic microscope and the maelstrom and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And I awoke on Christmas morning at the end of 1963 and my mother had bought me eleven volumes of the set of twelve from a barrow outside a Piccadilly junk shop with the money she’d scrimped and saved for me.’
It was guilt that made him talk like this, that prompted this bathos to which he was inclined. His mother, worn out, had died before he’d made the money that would have made her dotage comfortable.
‘Come, Martin.’
I followed him. He led me to the library where he took a key from a bureau drawer and opened a locked display case. Behind its carved-oak and scrolled-glass doors I saw Arthur Mee’s encyclopedias on their shelf, his name on their worn, blue cloth spines.
‘There are twelve volumes here, Dad.’
Beside me, he nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was providing me with the human touch he needed for comfort at the mention of his mother. ‘I sourced the twelfth. It’s the same edition, printed in the same year. I wanted the full set, with full integrity.’
I looked up at my father’s education in the wider world, his bookbound travels, his dreams and aspirations bound in blue cloth. There wasn’t a lot to say.
He reached for a volume, thumbed out a spine. Volume six, it was. He held the spine of the heavy book in the palm of his hand and it fell open. I took a step back and looked at the open pages.
And I saw a picture of Harry Spalding’s schooner rounding a buoy in brilliant sunshine on sun-dappled water at an angle dictated by taut sails that seemed to threaten disaster and promise triumph at the same exultant moment.
‘
‘When I saw these pictures, Martin, I swore that I would own and sail this boat. And I do and I will. And nothing will stop me. And I hope to God you have the compassion to indulge an old man’s vanity in fulfilling that dream.’
I said nothing.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I sipped from my cup. The coffee it contained was cold.
I could hear the faint hum in the library of the humidor that kept my father’s cigars fresh. In the parking garage twenty feet beneath our feet, some fellow from Cracow or Kiev would be waxing the bodywork of the Bentley and the Aston Martin. But later in the afternoon, his old boxing trophies would be taken from their place of pride and faithfully buffed. And suddenly, I understood my father’s retirement. At fifty-five, he had capitulated to the dreams of his childhood. He would indulge and fulfil them now, because he had the time and the means. He would not be deterred, either. He would act on these infantile whims with an iron will.
‘Could I see the log today?’
‘In what demeanour did you find my boat?’
‘Demeanour?’
‘Condition. Aspect. Boats have each of them a character, son. Did you find her defiant in the onslaught of yesterday’s storm?’
I struggled to remember the boat’s specifications. She was 121 feet in length, with a beam of nineteen feet and an eleven-foot draught. She weighed seventy tons. She was a two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner with a total sail area of just over 5,000 square feet. She was the
‘Good. Plugs?’
‘I didn’t see any. Butt joints are minimal and the planks are fastened from below.’
‘Hadley told me the spars are laminated Alaskan spruce.’
‘I’d happily take his word for it. It was gloomy yesterday afternoon and dark under her tarpaulin. But they looked very handsome, very well finished. Can I see the log today?’
‘Of course you can. But it’s more than a day’s reading, I think.’ He took some keys from a drawer in an antique bureau and tossed them at me. I caught them deftly enough. ‘There’s a storage facility I use.’
I nodded. I knew about the storage facility. I had been there. It was the place in which he secreted stuff he did not want to part with when a divorce negotiation deteriorated into a tug of war or a smash and grab. My father owned a substantial number of valuable modern paintings mostly picked up in the 1980s and early 90s when the painters had still been students struggling to pay their rent. It was over a decade since I’d seen a single one of them hanging in his house. They were stacked in darkness and secrecy in the storage facility in South Wimbledon. Everything of my mother’s was there, too, in a room a person with a morbid turn of mind might term a shrine.
It took me an hour to get to Wimbledon and then another forty-five minutes to travel the half-mile distance to the storage facility car park. When I did finally arrive, I could see what had gridlocked the road. There were two fire tenders, as well as an accident investigation vehicle and a Met police car together blocking half its width. There was
